“I’d really love to go, Shep,” she said. “The New England coast is really special—I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. There’s something about it…the hardness of it, I think. It’s like you can walk right up on the very top of the earth, in all the clean, sharp light and air and wind. At home sometimes your feet seem to just…sink into the surface, right up to your knees…do you know what I mean?”
“I sure do,” I said. I did. The sucking, amorphous surface of the South; the dark, damp pull of old roots…
“Anyway, it’s only a long weekend. I’ll be home for three weeks at Christmas. And they’re really nice people, a big family, and so funny; they laugh all the time…. Do you think you could maybe tell Mama for me? I’m afraid if I call her…”
She let her voice trail off, but I knew what she feared. I feared it for her. Lucy continued to do well at home, but I knew that she missed Malory fiercely. Jack told me that she had called Wellesley so many times during Malory’s first weeks there that he had finally had a long talk with her, and they made a deal that thereafter she would call only once a week. But I thought that the old calls of blood and spirit probably went out almost constantly.
“Unless you think I should come on home,” she said. I heard the old anxiety.
“No. I’ll tell her,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Have a good time with your friend and her family and we’ll see you at Christmas.”
There was a small silence, and then she said, in a low voice, “Actually, it’s a him. But I don’t think I want Mama to know that yet. There’s absolutely nothing to it—we’ve just met.”
“I got you,” I said. “Good thinking. I’ll just say friend. Are you sure that’s all he is, Mal?”
My voice was teasing, but not my stilled and waiting heart.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Don’t worry about that. These guys up here are too fast-talking and sharp-edged for me. And there’s not a one of them that holds a candle to you. I’m safe.”
“See you Christmas, then,” I said, and hung up to dial Lucy.
“Oh, shit,” she said when I told her that Malory would not be coming home, but then, “Oh well. It’s just as well, maybe. I’ve got a long piece on MARTA due the Monday after Thanksgiving. I was going to have to work all weekend, anyway. But it pisses me off that she calls you instead of me. What did she think I was going to do, have a fit?”
“The thought probably occurred to her,” I said.
Lucy laughed.
“No fits,” she said. “Absolutely no fits.”
So Malory came rushing and glowing back into our lives at Christmas, slender and vital as ever, and with a new layer of Easternness over her that was, I suppose, inevitable, considering how quickly I had acquired my own patina of Princeton at her age. I rather missed the ardent girlishness of her, though. The Malory who returned to Atlanta that winter was all woman, and very lovely indeed.
It was a good Christmas, almost picture-book perfect, at least to me. We had a brief, pretty snow that stuck, and lasted several days. The weather otherwise was clear and blue and sharp: real Christmas weather. With no close friends in the city, Malory spent much of her time with Jack and her mother at the farmhouse, walking in the winter woods and decorating the sagging old house and cooking enormous, elaborate meals that only she and Jack ate. She told me, as we sat before the fire in the summerhouse by the glow of the little tree I had put up just for her, that Lucy only picked at her food, smoking incessantly and staring at her with her uncanny light blue eyes. Malory spent a lot of time with me that Christmas. I loved the long afternoons and evenings.
“Sometimes I feel like she’s trying to memorize my face or something,” she said. “And sometimes she just puts her hand on my arm or knee and leaves it there. Poor Mama—there’s so little in her life that’s fun anymore, with me gone. Jack’s practically an Olympic sleeper now. And all she does is work. Just work. But she’s not drinking. And she really does look better. I’ve been awfully worried about her. Sometimes I feel so guilty up there at school, so interested in my courses, and having such a good time, when I know she misses me so awfully.”
“Of course she misses you,” I said. “We all do. But we all want you to have this experience. You know she wouldn’t want you to give that up. She hasn’t said so, has she?”
“Oh no. Not in words, anyway. But she wants me home. We have that other language, you know. She tells me that way.”
“Turn the receiver off for the next four years,” I said. “She may want you home on that level, but she’d be wrecked with guilt if she thought you left college and came home because of her. I’m sure of that. And I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”
She stretched, a long, luxurious stretch, and sighed deeply.
“You always say the right thing,” she said. “The one thing that makes everything all right. Sometimes I wish you were my father.”
“Why?” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “Don’t I make a good friend?”
“The best,” she said, reaching over and squeezing my hand. “It’s just that Jack seems so absent. Like he’s nothing to do with me. Like I’m not really there, or he isn’t. He’s awfully passive, Shep. Sometimes a day or two will go by before he says a complete sentence. I can’t imagine him when he married Mama….”
“He’s a good man, Malory,” I said, not for the first time. “He’s had a tough time. He was a fine man then, full of passion, like she was, and if most of it’s been burned out of him by now…well, you can see how that might be.”
“You didn’t lose yours,” she said.
Oh, my dear, I thought, I did—I lost it all but one. But I cannot tell you about that.
“Well, I didn’t have to live with your mother, either,” I said.
“You lived with her longer than he has,” Malory said stubbornly.
“It was different then,” I said. “What burns now, warmed then.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can see that. Oh, poor Jack. Poor Mama. Poor everybody.”
“Not so poor,” I said. “We’ve all had you.”
“See what I mean, about saying the right thing?” she said, getting up from the sofa to kiss me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’ll never have to find out,” I said.
She went back to school three days early, to go skiing at Stowe with her friend and his brothers, and after she had kissed me good-bye and run out to the Ford, which was coughing sulkily in the driveway with Jack at the wheel and Lucy in the backseat, for the trip to the airport, I went back into the summerhouse and shut the door on the cold, pearled light of the dying day and put another log on the fire. If I could have, I would have built a bonfire that roared and bellowed up to the diamond chips of the emerging stars, a conflagration to challenge the very solstice, for the coldness and blackness inside me was nearly total.
I don’t know why that twilight was so desperately bleak. Malory was whole and alive and beautiful in her dark-lit youth, and thriving at her school like a colt in deep bluegrass. She was happy; she was as safe as we could make her; she loved me. I would see her again perhaps at Easter and surely for the long summer vacation. Lucy was inching back toward stability and even Jack Venable seemed a little better, for Lucy’s salary at the weekly had allowed him to give up his evening teaching job, and the desperate white exhaustion had loosened its grip somewhat. The Compleat Georgian was nearing completion, and a good small university press had gotten wind of it and written expressing interest. It should have been a good time for me, or at least not a bad one.
But the starless darkness that fell down when Malory ran out of the summerhouse did not lift. I made myself a drink, and put Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter on the stereo, and picked S. J. Perelman off the shelf, and settled with all three before the fire, blackness whirling inside my head like snow. I sat sipping and half listening and staring at meaningless type, a gale of mortality and despair roaring around me, for what seemed hours on end.
Old, my mind keened. Old, old, old…
I cannot remember a worse time in my life, except one, and I cannot to this day say precisely why it was so.
Until Sarah Cameron appeared in the door of the summerhouse, I did not even realize that it was New Year’s Eve.
I blinked at her stupidly, feeling as though I were struggling up through thick, stagnant water toward sunlight. She stood in the open doorway, cold wind rushing in behind her, dressed in a short red satin evening dress with spaghetti straps and in high-heeled silver sandals, and a beautiful dark mink almost the color of her hair was thrown around her shoulders. In one hand there was an unopened bottle of champagne. She was smiling, and her face was so white that the color on her high cheekbones looked like badly applied rouge. From where I sat on the sofa, I could see her lips trembling around the smile.
“It’s you,” I said witlessly.
“It is. It surely is,” she said. “Happy New Year, Shep.”
“What are you doing here all dressed up?” My conversation would have seemed dull in a marginal kindergarten.
“I…oh, Snake and Lelia talked me into going to that awful thing the club has every year, and it was a mistake. I realized that if I stayed an hour longer I was going to have to kiss about twenty drunk people I loathe. So I pinched a bottle of champagne from a tray and came over here to wish you Happy New Year. And”—her voice broke into a near-operatic tremolo—“and to seduce you. Do you think one bottle will do it?”
She laughed, and I realized with a remote shock that she was not a little drunk. She came across the room and sat down carefully at the other end of the sofa, and then I could see the liquid glitter, like unshed tears, that her great eyes had always seemed to get when she had had too much to drink, back when we both were young. Back then…
“You look awfully pretty. Is that a new coat?” I said. The dragging blackness weighed so heavily on me that it was an effort to frame the words. I wanted to put my head into her satin lap and howl. But I sensed that if I made a move toward her, she would bolt like a wild thing. She was, I realized, badly frightened. I could not imagine why, and I could not think what to do about it.
“No. It’s Mother’s,” she said. “She gave it to me when they moved. She said she never intended to go outside when it was cold again as long as she lived. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Shep? Not to ever be cold again…”
Tears started down her face, and she turned away and scrubbed at them with her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not a good drunk. I’m sure you remember that. A crying jag is not what I had in mind here.”
I took the hand that shielded her face and turned it over and looked at it. It seemed to be made of ice. My own did, too. I could not feel her flesh. There were faint half-moons of dark blue—Prussian, I thought inanely—under the short, buffed bare nails.
“You’re painting again,” I said dully. “I’m awfully glad. I hated it when you stopped.”
“Not really painting,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it, and smiling even more brightly. A lock of her dark, glossy hair fell over her forehead. “I’m teaching. Or rather, taking a few private pupils two or three times a week. I get them on referrals from the school of art at the museum. Some of them are really quite good. And it does feel good to hold a brush again. Awful on my nails, though…”
Her laugh was a stilted social one I had literally never heard before.
“Have you got a studio now?” I said, just as politely. I did not seem to know who she was, this satin-shining, tremulous small woman in my living room, thrumming like a high voltage wire and smelling of Joy and cold fur. I did not seem to know who I was, sitting and looking at her.
“I fixed up one in the basement,” she said, and then grimaced. “I know, it sounds grisly. But it was the only place in the house I could do it.”
“Did you ever think of opening the one on Muscogee?” I said. “Not the house, just the studio. It would be perfect.”
“I can’t go over there. There’s not anybody there that I know,” she said obscurely. Under the despair and strangeness, my heart twisted.
“Well, at least you’re painting,” I said.
“At least that,” she agreed. “It gives me something to do. Oh God, Shep. I don’t need something to do. I’ve got plenty to do. I need the money, that’s why I’m doing it. I hate it when I lie. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”
She bit her lip and looked away, and I covered her cold hand with mine.
“I have more money than God,” I said. “I never spend any. Let me give you some money, Sarah. I can’t stand it if you’re giving painting lessons in your basement because you need the money.”
She disengaged her fingers and covered both flaming cheeks with both hands.
“I don’t know what in God’s name is the matter with me tonight,” she said, and her voice trembled again. “I didn’t come over here to beg money from you. Mother and Daddy would give me all the money I needed, or Mother would, if I’d let her. I just didn’t want to take it from her. And I’m sure as hell not going to take any from you. I’m not really poor. It’s just that right now, with both girls in school…the painting lessons are just the ticket. They bring me just enough, and I can stop them when I don’t need the extra anymore. And then, one day the Muscogee house will sell, and that money will be mine—I’m appalled at myself for even mentioning it to you. I thought I was coming over to wish you Happy New Year and escape the club letches. It seemed like a good idea at the time….” Tears were close under the surface of her voice again.
“It was a good idea,” I said. “It was a magnificent idea. I was just sitting here feeling sorry for myself, and about a thousand years old. I didn’t even realize it was New Year’s Eve. I really would have put my head in the oven if I had.”
She laughed, a trembling little laugh, and the tears receded.
“I know,” she said. “Is there anything worse? All that horn blowing, and frantic smiling and dancing and yelling, and kissing all those people you don’t even speak to the rest of the year…Shep?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that first New Year’s Eve you were home from Princeton? And we went to Hart’s?”
“And it snowed, and we sat in the bay window looking over Peachtree Street and watched it come down, and drank Taittinger blanc de blanc? Yes,” I said, “I remember.”
“It was the last really, really good New Year’s Eve I can remember,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Let’s do it again,” she said, and fished the bottle from the sofa beside her and held it up. It was Taittinger. The black ice lock in my heart stirred a little, ponderously and far, far down.
“Let’s do,” I said.
I got a couple of stemmed glasses from the kitchen, and opened the champagne while she watched. It made a wonderful, festive whoosh, and fountained all over the hearth. She laughed, a small, prissy sound, and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed, the old Atlanta Pink posture of genteel repose, watching me pour the fizzing gold into the glasses.
I handed her one and glanced at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. Twenty of twelve.
“Happy New Year, Sarah,” I said.
“Happy New Year, Shep.”
We drank. We drank again. The clock moved, the fire spat, Ella segued into “Love for Sale,” and we drank again. We finished the bottle of Taittinger in seven minutes flat. We did not speak in all that time. When we both opened our mouths to do so at once, and stopped and laughed, and began again, I suddenly realized that I could not feel my lips, and said, “God, I think I’ve sat here and gotten drunk as a skunk.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I could have done it otherwise.”
“Done what?” I said owlishly.
“Seduced you. That really is what I came for,” Sarah Cameron Gentry said.
I closed one eye and peered at her, to see if she wo
uld stop the slow spin she had begun. She did: The spin stopped and she became Sarah again, sitting bare-shouldered and beautiful and ripe as a small plum in my firelight, and literally terrified. I stared with both eyes, squinting to focus. She was not teasing.
“Can you bear to do that?” I said. “Can you, after all those years and what I did to you and what I’ve turned into? Can you, Sarah?”
“I can’t bear not to,” she said, her voice very small, borne out on a long, trembling breath. “I can’t bear not to. I’ve missed you for almost twenty years. And I’ve just…been around women too damned long, Shep.”
I stood up, very slowly, my legs unsteady under me, my heart starting a long, dragging, heavy tattoo. I held out my arms to her. I had no idea on earth what I was going to do next.
“Then come here, Sarah Cameron,” I said. “Come here and seduce me for New Year’s Eve.”
She put her glass down and stood herself, looking at me almost defiantly, firelight leaping on her shoulders and face, her eyes glittering with liquor and tears.
“Wait a minute,” she said, slurring just a little. She was swaying very slightly, almost imperceptibly. But I had the sense that beneath the protective rush of the champagne she knew exactly what she was about, and it was that which so frightened her.
“I want you to be sure you know what you’re getting,” she said.
Sarah stepped out of her sandals. She slipped the straps of the red satin dress down off her shoulders, as slowly and delicately as if she were in a pool of blue baby spotlight. She peeled the dress down to her hips and stepped out of it. Underneath she wore a scrap of black satin-and-lace bra, and black panty hose. Her rich, compact little body shone through the black, pale gold like new honey, white only where a recent summer’s bikini had shielded her from the kiss of her beloved sun. Good muscles slid in her stomach and arms and shoulders.
“Can you do it with this?” she said, running her hands down her body. “It’s not young anymore.” I stood staring, blood pounding dully at my temples, ears roaring. I could not speak.
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